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Date:
Monday , October 30, 2006Category:
Xbox 360Manufacturers:
MicrosoftAuthor:
Steve LynchEditor:
Kyle Bennett
Inside The Xbox Live Operations Center
[H] Console takes an exclusive behind the scenes look at the Xbox Live
Command Center with Jason Coon, Operations Program Manager for Xbox
Live.
continued...
If there is a reported Xbox Live outage, how do you know?
I suppose that all depends on who reports it. I've never, not once,
seen the XOC caught off guard about a problem. They monitor every
aspect of the service so closely that any disruption in service is
immediately noticed. If the problem is something that requires my
attention, they call me right away, even if it's 2:00am on a
Saturday.
What other types of information can you call up on the system?
We can pull up all types of information from how many people are
playing specific games on Xbox Live to how much free memory is
available on our Xbox.com Web servers. The purpose of the system is to
keep things running smoothly, so we track anything and everything that
helps us achieve that purpose.
Why 5 copies of each game?
The XOC has five copies of every game published for both Xbox and Xbox
360 because at times we need multiple people to be signed on to the
same game at once. When you walk in and see everyone in the XOC playing
Halo2, they are really working, really.
So when an issue comes in, how is it handled?
Depends on what it is and how it affects the service. The XOC uses a
prioritizing system to track problems. Whenever an issue is first
reported, they always take a few minutes to gather more data, assess
impact, and validate that the problem is real and not a false positive
or momentary glitch. If it's a Priority 1 issue, they are waking
people up at home within 10 minutes. Fortunately that very rarely
happens. Lower priority issues are quickly addressed in the normal
course of the day.
How many servers are in use at the Xbox Live network operations center?
Classified, lets call it "many".
You said seven copies of Live are running on the servers, what are they
and why?
In addition to our Production environment that is used by all of our
Xbox Live users, we also maintain seven test and development
environments that are basically smaller versions of the real Xbox Live.
As I said earlier, we are always working on the next version of Xbox
Live, so these other environments are what we use to develop and test
new features. This is also where we can practice the deployment steps
we will use prior to releasing new features to Production. You've
heard about our semi-annual service updates, our Spring and Fall
releases? We actually practice deploying those updates several times in
these test and development environments so that when it comes time to
do it for real, we've already worked out all of the issues and
everything runs smoothly.
What is Partner Net?
This is one of those seven environments I just mentioned, and is the
primary environment used by Xbox partners (1st and 3rd party
developers) for testing their new code against our new code.
How is Microsoft Game Studios classified?
We treat Microsoft Game Studios just as we would any 3rd party
developer. We restrict their access to our facility, and we ensure that
we don't share 3rd party data with them.
Why?
We highly value our relationships with our 3rd party developers, and we
don't want to do anything that even gives the appearance of
favoritism to our own in-house game studios. 3rd party developers are
our partners, but in regards to MGS, they are competitors as well, and
we have a responsibility to protect the intellectual property of all of
our partners and ensure that they all are supported equally. It
doesn't matter that the folks at MGS wear blue badges just like us,
there are some things that we simply won't let them see or do.
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